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Thursday, 23 February 2012

Interesting talk by UCL Material Culture masters grad Sam Barton who is works at commercial semiotics company Added Value yesterday at the UCL #anthropology department. He ran through the conventional company credentials and then explained the origins of commercial semiotics in literary criticism and cultural studies before engaging in a bit of deconstruction.

In short, brands are cultural entities and if culture informs communications then you need something like semiotics, which draws on a plethora of theories, to see the patterns. Brands need to understand dominant culture to continue to be relevant to it. This inverts Williams' whole dominant/emergent/residual theory of culture whose purpose was to liberate through a revelation of culture's workings. Basically what he was saying was that on a pessimistic view, the very entities which certain theorists of a Marxist persuasion viewed as the enemy are benefiting from these theorists' insights. In a final insult, an academic mystique (I thought much like the scientific mystique around neuromarketing: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/newsandevents/releases/Pages/neuromarketing.aspx) has been cultivated around semiotics which obscures its nature as a pragmatic technical process (Latour). This is a form of enchantment (Gell).

Semiotics is by no means the only domain in business with roots in academia to cultivate a mystique by association. Anthropologists also 'black box' their work in the corporate space although reservations hinted at in this talk remind me of an interesting paper by Lucy Suchman which examines anthropology's role in the 'cultural turn' and the battle faced by many social scientists with their conscience when: "incorporated economically into an organisation committed to operating in the Market." But with a limited number of academic jobs on offer, you gotta earn a crust and code mining sounds more appealing than coal mining...